Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history
‘The past is the past. It is no longer important,’ says Brigadier Billal Saleh Shukur, commander of Iraq’s 21st army brigade now occupying a part of Basra. We have met on a warm March day at the airbase outside the city, at the start of a five-a-side football tournament between teams drawn from the Iraqi and British forces. I had expressed my profound regret that the American-British Coalition, which rightly reveres every one of its own casualties, has always refused to count how many Iraqi citizens have been killed in six years of violence; and indeed has invested considerable effort in discrediting any human rights organisation that estimated the death toll.
